The processing of poultry such as chickens and turkeys (birds) has become highly automated. Birds generally are conveyed suspended by their legs from shackles of an overhead conveying systems along processing lines for evisceration, cut-up, and further processing. It is highly desirable to perform as many of the processing operations on the birds as possible while the birds are suspended from their shackles to minimize handling and ensure greater uniformity in the cutup and processing of the birds.
Accordingly, the birds are conveyed through various processing devices while they move in series suspended from their shackles along the processing path. For example, the birds can be de-feathered, decapitated, opened, eviscerated, and cut apart while being advanced progressively along a processing path suspended from shackles. As a result, the labor required for processing poultry carcasses is significantly reduced while uniformity and adjustability in the sectioning of the poultry carcasses into various poultry parts is more predictable.
Chicken wings, commonly cooked and served as “buffalo wings,” have become a popular takeout item for home consumption and as menu items in restaurants and fast food outlets. A demand has emerged for larger and meatier wings. To accommodate this demand, extra meat generally is taken from breast portions the birds adjacent the wings and remains attached to the wings. This is not the most desirable meat to leave attached to the wings because breast meat is significantly more valuable than other meat on the carcass such as back meat on either side of the backbone. However, back meat heretofore has been difficult to remove from a poultry carcass. There is a need for a method and apparatus that separates wings from poultry carcasses and leaves a piece of back meat with the wings to make the wings meatier rather than a piece of valuable breast meat.
To ensure efficiency and proper cooking of the wings, it is important to retailers, restaurants, and others that all the wings to be cooked in a batch are of substantially the same weight. Larger wings from larger birds do not cook as fast as smaller wings from smaller birds, and thus there is a possibility that the larger wings of a batch with smaller wings will be undercooked or that the smaller wings in a batch with larger wings will be overcooked. The result is poor quality end product that may have to be discarded. There is a need for a method and apparatus for removing wings from poultry carcasses that ensures that the separated wings of a batch are of substantially the same weight.
In the prior art, wing removal machines and processes also result in bone pieces and shards being left with removed wings or the carcass. This is because accurately slicing through the wing precisely between the bones of the shoulder joint has been a difficult challenge. Average “yield” of quality wings without cut-through bones and shards has hovered around 70% for a long time. There is a need for a method and apparatus for removing wings from poultry carcasses that increases this yield substantially into the 90 percentile.
Generally, a need exists for a poultry wing remover and method that addresses the above and other needs with speed, precision, and reliability. It is to the provision of such a poultry wing remover and method that the present invention is primarily directed.